Microsoft announced that Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, has adopted Office 365 to boost collaboration and scale productivity, which will further empower its employees to achieve more.
Etihad’s 20,000 employees, from more than 150 different countries, fly to over 80 destinations from its hub in Abu Dhabi and serve 18 million passengers annually. Chief among its digital goals are the automation of processes and the empowerment of employees through collaboration and communication platforms.
“Etihad is proud of creating a unique travel experience for our guests while empowering our employees to be effective innovators,” said Mike Papamichael, Vice President Technology and Innovation, Etihad Aviation Group. “To provide the best service, you need to not only have the best people in place, but the best tools to help them collaborate and make decisions in real time. We are pleased to partner with Microsoft towards this goal.”
Yammer now forms the heart of Etihad’s employees’ social network and acts as a collaboration tool and a platform for sharing company-wide news in real time. Adopting Office 365 with its power platforms has helped Etihad with a 30% growth in their process optimisation target. In alignment with Etihad’s optimisation targets across departments and subsidiaries, Microsoft Power Platform – which brings together Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow – has been leveraged to enhance the company’s business processes, freeing up employees to commit time to more innovative activities.
More than 260 live applications across Etihad’s business units now rely on the new platform to optimise operations. And some 17,000 Etihad Business Users now keep in touch with co-workers and customers through Exchange Online, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams.
Etihad is also using Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) and especially InTune to secure access from mobile devices and provide the flexibility to be connected from anywhere, any device, at any time. “Etihad’s adoption of Office 365 to boost collaboration is the perfect illustration of the power of digital transformation to engage, empower, optimise and reinvent,” said Sayed Hashish, General Manager, Microsoft UAE. “The group’s journey was diligently managed, carefully designed, and now shows measurable achievements – real metrics, such as gains in time and the ROI that brings. We will continue to partner with organisations in the region to ensure they have the tools they need to achieve more.”
In addition, Etihad formed an Office 365-development pod consisting of fresh UAE local graduates who were nurtured by the Etihad leadership with the appropriate tools to upskill. They also developed a number of mobile and desktop friendly applications. Tamm is one of their recent success stories, an application that centralises all maintenance requests at the touch of a button, and Shukran, a peer recognition tool built in PowerApps.
Etihad will also be one of the first organisations in the UAE to migrate to Microsoft’s new cloud region in Abu Dhabi, one of two recently launched in the UAE. Microsoft’s new datacenters, one in Abu Dhabi and one in Dubai – now enable thousands of digitally innovative organisations across the Middle East, as they seek to engage customers, empower employees, optimise operations and reinvent products and services.
“Etihad is a prominent adopter of Microsoft Azure services, with the Etihad Enterprise Data Hub running on Azure. It has proven to provide huge value to Etihad business users, allowing them to drive better insights around the business and have a data driven culture. The agility, time to market and scalability of Azure cloud has enabled Etihad to effectively empower their business with great capabilities; allowing them to expand on their data and analytics platform–making it richer and of greater value”. Adds Hashish, Microsoft